Volume 31, Number 17 · November 8, 1984
B. B. and Company
By Stephen Spender
Mary Berenson: A Self-Portrait from Her Letters and Diaries
edited by Barbara Strachey, edited by Jayne Samuels
Norton, 319 pp., $18.95
A movie about the life of Bernhard (after 1914 known as Bernard) Berenson might bear a resemblance to Citizen Kane, though taking place in much more exalted circumstances. It would be an American story of a man who, emerging from a background of poverty and hardship, moves into a world of sweetness, light, power, and great wealth, becomes king of it, builds himself a palace, marries a beautiful woman of whom he demands that she should in every respect conform to his idea of her as worthy of him. The king is surrounded by courtiers and the object of almost universal adulation (although a few acquaintances and collaborators, interviewed after his death, spread ugly rumors about him).
Review, 2974 words
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